Berlin Wall Memorial: The View from the Tower

Why is it significant?

Climb to the top of the viewing tower beside the Documentation Centre and look down across Bernauer Straße. Below you lies a stretch of the Berlin Wall exactly as the border guards saw it: the grey outer wall, a sandy strip, a patrol road, tall lamps, a watchtower, and a second wall on the far side.

Key Facts

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Climb to the top of the viewing tower beside the Documentation Centre and look down across Bernauer Straße. Below you lies a stretch of the Berlin Wall exactly as the border guards saw it: the grey outer wall, a sandy strip, a patrol road, tall lamps, a watchtower, and a second wall on the far side. Bernauer Straße was where the division of Berlin cut deepest into everyday life. The border between the Soviet sector and the French sector ran along the front walls of the houses. The pavement belonged to West Berlin, in Wedding. The buildings on the south side belonged to the East, in Mitte. Step out of your front door, and you were in a different political world. When the border was sealed on the 13th of August 1961, people in those houses suddenly found themselves living in the wall itself. In the first days, some simply climbed out of their windows into the West, while neighbours below held out blankets. Then the doors were bricked up, then the windows, and in the end the residents were moved out and the houses torn down. Over the years the barrier grew into a deep system of walls, fences, alarms and floodlights that the GDR called the border security installations. Everyone else called it the death strip. The section below you was preserved in 1998, enclosed at both ends by tall steel walls designed by the architects Kohlhoff and Kohlhoff. From the street you can only peer through narrow slits. From up here you see what a would-be escaper faced, and how little chance they had. Across the whole city, the Wall around West Berlin ran for about one hundred and fifty-five kilometres. Research by this memorial counts at least 140 people who were killed at it or died in direct connection with it between 1961 and 1989. The memorial stretches along almost one and a half kilometres of the former strip, and our walk follows it east. Climb down, cross Bernauer Straße, and walk a little to your right, to a long wall of rusted steel filled with faces.